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Trucks have been no more immune than cars when it comes to suffering from automotive bloat. The F-150 of today is a beast of a thing compared to the ones I rode around in at the turn of the century, and that's the smallest truck Ford will sell us here in the US. Life is better for the small truck fan living in Australia. For whatever reason, the small truck never died out in the Antipodes, and Ford's Asia Pacific region will still sell you the Ranger, albeit one that's still bigger than any Ranger we remember.

While I'm not the biggest truck afficionado, I bring this up because Ford does in fact plan to bring the Ranger back to these shores (along with cult favorite Bronco), and when it does, it needs to make sure that it includes the Ranger Raptor. The truck people reading this will probably not require any further explanation. For everyone else, imagine a Focus RS, but it's a truck, and it's for driving in the desert. That's certainly my take-home from the video teaser that Ford just put out:

The Ranger Raptor is due out next year—if you live down under. The US won't get any Rangers at all until 2019, so we have no idea whether this spicy version will ever be seen with the steering wheel on the left. Somehow I imagine Ford is going to get a few phone calls today saying it needs to do just that.

Promoted Comments

Fuel economy isn't the problem. It's their physical size / weight. You can't fit/drive a corrado where you can an S10.

Yep, the CAFE standards have affected vehicle size. He didn't read the link so I'll post the pertinent bits here:

In 2006, CAFE altered the formula for its 2011 fuel economy targets, by calculating a vehicle’s “footprint”, which is the vehicle’s wheelbase multiplied by its wheel track. The footprint is expressed in square feet, and calculating this value is probably the most transparent part of the regulations. Fuel economy targets are a function of a vehicle’s footprint; the smaller the footprint, the tougher the standards are.

Unfortunately, the footprint method has the opposite effect; rather than encouraging auto makers to strive for unprecedented fuel economy in their passenger car offerings, it has incentivized auto makers to build larger cars, in particular, more car-based crossovers that can be classified as “trucks” as used to skew fleet average figures, much the same way the PT Cruiser did. Full-size trucks have become a “protected class”, safe from the most aggressive targets, while compact trucks have become nearly extinct as a result.

CAFE’s other victim is the compact truck segment. Many consumers don’t need a full-size truck (whether they acknowledge it or not), and the Ford Ranger, along with GM’s own compact pickups, had respectable followings among consumers looking for a smaller fuel-efficient pickup.

But the Ranger happens to fall into the “dead zone” of the CAFE footprint formula. Both curve graphs show a flat line at 55 square feet; in practical terms, a Mercedes-Benz S-Class carries this footprint. The Ranger, even in SuperCab configuration, has a footprint of 50 square feet, just short of the magic number. The best Ranger, fuel economy-wise, was a 4-cylinder manual truck, returning 22/27 mpg IRL; a respectable number, but one only available in a configuration that a minority of buyers would opt for. Equipped with a V6 and an automatic transmission, it would only return 14/18 mpg IRL, a figure that can be equalled by certain version of Ford’s V6 and V8 F-150 full-size pickups. By 2025, a theoretical Ranger with a footprint of 50 square feet would have to achieve fuel economy somewhere approaching 50 mpg CAFE. The 75 square foot F-150 would only have to reach in the high 30s CAFE.